What AI actually costs a small business per month

By Keith Myers · September 2026

Every pricing page shows a low number per user per month and every business owner multiplies it wrong. Here is what a 15 person company actually pays once the tools are set up properly, and the three costs that never appear on the page.

The general assistant: $20 to $30 per person

ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini. The business tiers all land in the same range, and the business tier is the one you want, because it is the tier where your data is excluded from training and an admin can see who has an account. The free tier is not cheaper. It is a different product with different data terms.

Do not buy this for everyone. Buy it for the people who write, quote, summarize, or answer questions all day. In a 15 person company that is usually five or six people. Call it $150 per month.

Meeting notes: $10 to $30 per person, often bundled

If you already pay for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace at the right tier, meeting transcription and summaries may be included. Check before you buy a standalone tool. If you do need one, only the people who run calls need a seat. Two or three seats, $40 to $80 per month.

Document search: $0 to $30 per person

Searching your own contracts, manuals, and past proposals by meaning rather than keyword. Increasingly built into the platform you already have. Standalone tools exist and are good, but start with what is bundled. Budget zero to begin, $100 per month if you outgrow the bundled version.

Automation glue: $20 to $100 flat

Routing emails, filing invoices, tagging tickets. Tools like Zapier, Make, or Power Automate charge by volume rather than by user, and most small businesses sit in the lowest paid tier. $30 per month is typical.

The total on the page

For a 15 person company using the first three items properly: roughly $300 to $450 per month. Not $20, and not $2,000. If someone quotes you a five figure monthly number for a business your size, ask what it includes, because it is not the tools.

The three costs that are not on the page

Setup time. Someone has to connect the tools to your email and files, set the data settings correctly, and turn off the defaults that share everything with everyone. Done properly this is one to three days of work, once. Done badly it is never finished.

Training time. Two hours per person, and a second short session a month later when the questions are better. Skip this and the subscriptions become the expensive kind: the kind nobody uses.

The wrong tier. The most common mistake we see is a team of ten on personal accounts because "the free one works fine." It does work fine. It also may be training on your client files. The difference between the free tier and the business tier is the entire reason the business tier exists.

What to do with these numbers

Add up the hours your team spends on the tasks the tools would take over. At $40 an hour loaded cost, $400 of tools needs to save ten hours a month to break even. Most companies that set this up properly save that in the first week. If yours would not, do not buy anything yet, and nobody honest will try to sell it to you.